The Jane Austen Book Club (15 page)

But we told him to take the call. We were done with our discussion and could let ourselves out. We carried our plates and our glasses to the kitchen, said good-bye to the cat and tiptoed away. Grigg was talking about his mother as we left; apparently she had a birthday coming up. Not a friend, then, we thought, but a sister.

After we'd gone, Grigg talked to Bianca about us. “I
think
they like me. They do give me a hard time. They just found out tonight that I read science fiction. That didn't go over well.”

“I could come up,” Bianca offered. “I'm not scared of Jane Austen–reading women. And nobody picks on my little brother.”

“Except you. And Amelia. And Cat.”

“Were we so awful?” Bianca asked.

“No,” Grigg said. “You weren't.”

W
hile he was cleaning up, Grigg remembered something. He remembered a day when he'd been playing secret agent and overheard a conversation his parents were having that was all about him. He was behind a curtain in the dining room and his parents were in the kitchen. He heard his father pull the tab on a can of beer. “He's more of a girl than any of the girls,” Grigg's father said.

“He's perfectly fine. He's still a baby.”

“He's almost in junior high. Do you have any idea what the life of a girly boy is like in junior high?”

The curtain breathed once, in and out. Grigg's heart was filled with a sudden fear of junior high.

“So teach him to be a man,” his mother said. “God knows you're the only one here who can.”

The next day at breakfast Grigg was told that he and his dad were going on a camping trip together, no girls allowed. They would hike and they would fish. They would sit around the campfire and tell each other stories, and there would be more stars in the sky than Grigg had ever seen.

Grigg's main image of camping was the little sandwiches you made with graham crackers, Hershey bars, and marshmallows roasted on sticks that you'd peeled with sharp and dangerous hunting knives. Naturally he was excited. Bianca and Cat said how glad they were not to be going. Even though they were hard-core outdoorswomen who had no trouble putting hooks right through worms so that their guts spilled out, and Bianca had once shot a Coke can off a fence with a BB gun. Even though Grigg would probably have nightmares like a baby and have to come home. Amelia had started a program to become an X-ray technician and was too grown-up to care who got to go camping and who didn't.

This was the seventies. Grigg's father had developed an obsession with the Heinlein book
Stranger in a Strange Land.
He took it out of the library and then told the librarian he'd lost it. For a couple of months now, it had been the only thing he read. When he wasn't reading it, he was hiding it somewhere. Grigg would have liked to take a look, but he couldn't find it. The library wouldn't allow him to check it out, even when they had a copy, which now they didn't.

The Harris men loaded the car with sleeping bags and groceries and headed north along 99 for Yosemite. Three hours later they picked up two girls at a gas station. “How far are you going?” Grigg's father asked them, and they said they were on their way to Bel Air, which was, of course, the wrong way and farther the wrong way than simply going back home would have been. So Grigg was astonished to hear his father agree to take them. What about no girls allowed?

Grigg's father was very chatty, and his language changed, so that suddenly he was using words like “far out” and “heavy.” “Your old man's pretty cool,” one of the girls told Grigg. She had a bandanna tied over her hair and a sunburnt nose. The other girl's hair was clipped close to her head—you could see the shape of her skull, and you could also see the shape of her breasts through the thin cotton of her blouse. She was black-skinned, but light, and with freckles. They were headed for a very mellow scene, they said, one that Grigg and his dad would probably dig.

“We're going camping,” Grigg told them.

His father frowned and dropped his voice so that only Grigg would hear. It wouldn't be cool to leave two pretty girls hitching, he said. Someone not right might pick them up next. Grigg wouldn't want to read that in the papers the next day! Suppose it was Bianca and Cat? Wouldn't Grigg want someone to take care
of them? A real man looked out for women. Besides, if they got to Yosemite a day late, what was the big deal with that?

By the time his father had finished, Grigg felt small and selfish. At the next stop his father bought dinner for everybody. Afterward Grigg found himself in the backseat with the girl with the bandanna. Her name was Hillary. The girl with the breasts was in the front. Her name was Roxanne.

There were some cosmic forces coming together, Hillary told them. The car windows were open; she had to talk very loud.

Grigg watched the landscape pass. He saw straight rows of almond trees that seemed to curve as they went by, roadside stands selling lemons and avocadoes. It had been a long time since the last rain. Little clouds of dust spun above the fields. “He Is Coming,” one billboard announced. “Are You Ready?”

Grigg pretended he was running alongside the car, leaping the drainage ditches and overpasses. He was as fast as the car, and as tireless. He swung arm over arm down the telephone wires.

If you knew anything about ancient texts, Hillary said, Nostradama and the like, then you knew some major karma was coming due. It was going to be intense, but it was going to be beautiful.

Grigg's dad said he'd suspected as much.

Roxanne changed the radio station from the one they'd been listening to.

They stopped often at gas stations so the girls could pee. Grigg's sisters never asked to stop the car to pee.

By the time they made it to the Grapevine, the sky was dark. The freeway was crowded. A river of red lights flowed in one direction, one of white in the other. Cat had once made up a game called Ghosts and Demons, based on car lights, but you couldn't play it when there were so many of them. Anyway, Cat was the
only one who could make it fun; without her it was a pretty boring game.

It was around nine o'clock when they drove through the gates to Bel Air. Hillary directed them to a massive house with a wrought-iron fence of metal leaves and vines on which actual leaves and vines had been trained. Grigg's father said he needed a rest from the driving, so they all went inside.

The house was enormous. The entryway was mirrored and marbled, and opened into a dining room whose glass-topped table had chairs for ten. Hillary showed them how there was a button on the floor beneath the table so the hostess could summon the help without leaving her seat. This seemed unnecessary to Grigg, as the room where the bell would ring, the kitchen, was only a few steps away. The house belonged to some friends of hers, Hillary said, but they were out of town.

The dining room ran into the kitchen, and across the back of both rooms was an atrium with a palm tree and three shelves of orchids. Past the glass of the atrium, Grigg could see the neon-blue water of a swimming pool, lit up and filled with people. Later, when he tried to remember this, Grigg asked himself how old these people had been. About Amelia's age. Maybe Bianca's. Certainly not his dad's.

In the kitchen, three kids were seated at the counter. Hillary got Grigg's dad a beer from the refrigerator. There was the smell of pot in the air. Grigg could recognize the smell of pot. He'd seen
2001: A Space Odyssey
six times, and two of those screenings had been on a university campus.

His dad began talking to a young man with long hair and a messianic face. His dad asked the young man whether he'd ever read Heinlein (he hadn't) and the young man asked whether Grigg's dad had ever read Hesse (he hadn't). Things were changing, they assured each other. The world was in spin. “It's a great
time to be young,” Grigg's dad said, which he clearly wasn't, Grigg hoped he knew.

Something about his dad's part of the conversation embarrassed Grigg. He excused himself to the bathroom (as if he would ever really need to go again!—all those stops on the road) and went to explore the house. He thought he might be running a slight fever. He had that magical, made-of-glass feeling and he moved through room after room, bedrooms and studies and libraries and TV rooms, as if in a dream. The house had rooms with floor-to-ceiling mirrors, a billiard table, and a wet bar. There was a girl's bedroom with a canopy bed and a Princess phone. Cat would die for a phone like that. Grigg made a collect call home.

Amelia answered. “How's the camping?” she said. “I didn't know there were phones in the high country.”

“We're not camping. We're in Bel Air.”

“This is costing a fortune. Give me your number and we'll call you right back,” Amelia said.

Grigg read the number off the dial. He lay on the bed under the canopy, pretending it was the jungle, mosquito nets, tribal drums, until the phone rang. “Hey there.” It was his mother. “How's the camping?”

“We're in a house in Bel Air,” Grigg said. “We're not going camping until tomorrow.”

“Okay,” his mother said. “Are you having a good time? Are you enjoying being with your dad?”

“I guess.”

“Thanks for calling,” his mom said. And then she hung up. She was going with the girls to a movie. Nothing he would like, she had assured him. Something girly.

Grigg went to open the girl's closet. He wasn't allowed in the girls' closets at home. There were scrapbooks in there, and shoe
boxes full of secret shit. Once he'd opened Cat's secret-shit shoe box, and she screamed at him for half an hour even though all he'd seen was some inexplicable buckeye nuts in a little plastic candy dish she'd lined with red velvet.

The only shoe boxes in this girl's closet had shoes in them. She also had a shoe tree. She had, in fact, more shoes than his three sisters put together.

Another place for secrets was under the folded clothes in the bureau. Grigg looked but again came up empty. There was a vanity table with a locked drawer, which he worked on for a while, but he needed fingernails or a credit card. Or a key. He found some keys on a chain slung over the bedpost. None of them fit.

A boy and a girl came into the bedroom. They were halfway out of their clothes before they even saw Grigg. The boy's penis bloomed through the slit in his shorts like a mushroom after a rain. Grigg put the keys on the vanity. The girl screamed when he moved, then laughed. “Do you mind, man?” the boy asked. “We'll only be a minute.” The girl laughed again and hit him in the arm.

Grigg went back to the kitchen. His dad was still talking to the messiah. Grigg hovered in the doorway at just that spot where the sounds from the pool were as loud as his father's voice. “You go the same places, see the same people. Have the same conversations. It takes like half your brain. Less,” Grigg's dad said.

“Jeez,” the boy said.

“Half a life.”

“Jeez.”

“It's like a cage and you don't even know when the door closed.”

The boy became more animated. “Feel around you.” He
demonstrated. “No bars, man. No cage. You're just as free as you think you are. Nobody makes you do it, man. Nobody makes you set the alarm, get up in the morning. Nobody but you.”

Grigg went outside to the pool. Someone threw a towel at him. It was Hillary, and she was wearing nothing but the rubber bands in her braids. She laughed when she saw that he was looking at her. “You're not such a little boy, after all,” she said. “But no clothes allowed out here. You want to look, you got to be looked at. Them's the rules. Otherwise”—she leaned in and her breasts swung toward him—“we'll think you're a little pervert.”

Grigg went back inside. His face was burning, and the most familiar part of the strange stew of things he was feeling was humiliation. He focused his attention on that part simply because he recognized it. In the study he found another phone and called home again. He didn't expect anyone to answer—he thought they'd all be at the movies—but Amelia picked up. She told the operator she wouldn't accept the charges, and then, less than a minute after he had hung up, the phone rang and it was Grigg's mom again.

“We're on the way out the door,” she said. She sounded cross. “What
is
it?”

“I want to come home,” Grigg said.

“You always want to come home early. Cub Scout camp? Every sleepover since you were three? I always have to make you stay, and you always end up having a fabulous time. You have
got
to toughen up.” Her voice was louder. “I'm coming,” she called. And then, to Grigg again, “Be fair to your dad. He's been really looking forward to this time with you.”

Grigg put the receiver down and went to the kitchen. “I'm so unhappy,” his father was saying. He passed a hand over his eyes as if he might have been crying.

Grigg would rather have taken all his clothes off and stayed at the pool to be laughed at than hear his father say this. He tried to figure out ways to make his father happy. He tried to figure out the ways he was making his father unhappy.

He made up his mind to leave. If his father wouldn't take him, he'd go alone. He'd walk. The days would pass; he'd eat oranges off the trees. Maybe find a dog to walk with him, keep him company. Nobody would force him to get rid of a dog that had brought him all the way home. Maybe he'd hitch and maybe someone not right would pick him up and that would be the end of that. He heard the sound of breaking glass and laughter from the pool. Doors slamming. The phone ringing, deep in the house. I'm so unhappy, he thought. He went to the room with the canopy bed and fell asleep.